You know, part of why I've always had trouble drawing is that I will put down sketchy pencil lines and then I'll look at what I have and be like "Okay time for the next step" and then continue to stare at it like "Oh god what if I ruin it"
Gotta get over that
Maybe I will ruin it but like
That's how you learn
Lady, EVOLVED 
@coriander it’s not “ruining” it’s “taking it in a different direction”
@Lady Well I still worry about taking it in the wrong direction =P
@coriander an art tip is that the direction you wind up taking things won’t always line up with the direction you intended to take things; this is called “having an art style” and you should lean into it
@coriander i think many if not most artists like the directions other artists can take things better than the direction that they wind up taking things themselves, but the good artists make peace with the fact that they can’t be other people and learn their own strengths
@coriander like half a decade ago i was following an artist on tumblr and they were chatting about the most important things they had to learn as an artist and one of them was essentially “it’s okay if you’re not your own type”; i.e. that the art you admire and the art you make don’t have to and maybe shouldn’t look the same
and i think this really is a key metric of artistic maturity, like, your artistic vision should follow from who you are and what you are capable of, not the other way around, even when your own stengths don’t necessarily line up with your aesthetic preferences
and it’s also why kids’ art is always good; kids are just unapologetically themselves all the time and don’t know any differently
@coriander anyway long rant but “don’t conceptualize your art as a finished product before you’ve actually finished it, think of it as a record of a process of artmaking” and “the only way you can fuck up the process of artmaking is by failing to be your authentic self”
@Lady I am trying to learn this lesson by getting back into drawing anything at all, like
I've never been good at drawing people and I used to let that extremely frustrate and discourage me but now instead I'm just trying drawing things that aren't people and seeing how that goes cos maybe I'm better at landscapes than people
@coriander yeah i’ve been slowly realizing that my brain is just better wired for small‐scale stuff and like, pixel art than it is for anything realistic or detailed and i don’t do enough art these days but i keep meaning to actually start taking that more seriously
@Lady That's very fair